It was the loudest sound kids had ever heard at that time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the "dirty music" of their life style. ("Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap... and turn the volume all the way down.") But in the theatre, watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down. I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere... he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down. Blackboard Jungle, not even considering the story line (which had the old people winning in the end) represented a strange sort of "endorsement" of the teen-age cause: "They have made a movie about us, therefore, we exist..."

Perhaps the first well known combination of rock music and motion picture imagary. This was probably like that scene in "Back to the Future" when Marty McFly introduced the unheard of music of Chuck Berry to the square white kids at the Under the Sea dance. They would never be the same again.

Blackboard Jungle is one of those turning points in the world of filmdom. Plotwise, it showed teens in a more realistic manner as opposed to what was being depicted on say, Ozzie & Harriet. Plus it starred the always cool Glen Ford.

Nice all the stuff is in the Viva Zappa book i never knew where they came from Sometimes in the book it states then it don't it has (The gas co)part as life magazine then all the others nothing i always wondered what was happening.

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